The trouble with domain names

Congratulations! You came up with your brand new idea, you decided on the company name and successfully acquired a domain name for your website. 

You are now on your way to build the next unicorn — AKA a billion-dollar company.

I know that getting the right domain is hard. All the good ones are gone. Experts’ suggestions to make your domain short and easy to pronounce and spell make it even more difficult.

In many instances, a domain that ends in '.com' is taken, and we are left with mostly two-letter domains. Which one to choose? Some are becoming more popular based on the latest hype.

Not having '.ai' means that your company is not on the cutting edge.

Not sure if you remember other popular ones from the past — '.ly' was used by Bitly to shorten URLs to fit within the 140 characters allowed by Twitter and track usage.

Or '.fm' to evoke an association with your favourite radio station.

One of them was also '.io,' which in geek talk means 'input/output' and was made popular by websites Github.io or Sentry.io to name a few. But they are also popular with Web3 & crypto companies, which spent good money to buy them. To get appreciation for the scale, Paul Kane, who obtained the right to operate the domain under his private company, later sold this right to another company for $70 million.

Perhaps one detail is not as obvious, and it is the common thing for all these domain names. They belong to countries, because they are country codes. The '.ly' is owned by Libya, '.ai' is for Anguilla, a British overseas territory and '.fm' is for the Federated States of Micronesia.

And '.io'?

And that's the thing. The '.io' is the country code for the British Indian Ocean Territory. A cluster of islands 'near' Mauritius was a subject of territorial dispute between the UK and Mauritius for many, many years.

Finally, on October 3rd, these countries signed an agreement to transfer the islands to Mauritius.

The catch?

After the agreement comes into effect, there will be no more British Indian Ocean Territory and no more '.io' domain. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) — the organization overseeing domains — will retire that extension after 5 years and those URLs will be 'bye-bye.'

Or will it?

One would think that something so mundane as two-letter domains can rarely attract any attention. One example is the '.su' domain, which was assigned to the Soviet Union before its disintegration.

Another example is '.yu,' which was a domain for Yugoslavia. When that country broke up, the new states couldn't agree on who was going to own and operate it.

Apparently, a break-in at a university and theft were involved in the fight over that domain. That's the power of the Internet. Maybe all the companies with the '.io' domain will start their own country and pay IANA to be recognized as such.

The recurrent pattern? When choosing a domain name, make sure that you also pick a good domain extension. Naturally '.com' is a sign of maturity and stability for any business. Going with a country domain exposes you and your company to real-world events, and you might end up web-less, which is short for homeless on the Internet.